Truth and Custom

From Daughter Zion:

...a custom contrary to truth. Such customs either wither away because their root, the truth, has dried up, or they continue to proliferate contrary to conviction, and thus destroy the correlation between truth and life. They thereby lead to a poisoning of the intellectual-spiritual organism, the results of which are incalculable. (p.11)

The purification of Christianity, the search for its original essence, is carried on today, in the era of historical consciousness, almost entirely by seeking its oldest forms and establishing them as normative. The original is confused with the primitive. (p.38)

 The first quote, I believe, makes the case for why we should take thought of those who make Christmas a secular festival.

The Physics (and Myths) of Baseball

Some of the more useful facts I gathered from The Physics of Baseball:

The inclination of the arc of the swing does not strongly affect the velocity of the struck ball, but it does affect the mean angle at which the ball leaves the bat and, hence, the probability of hitting a very long ball and a home run. The great high-average line-drive hitters...swung the bat such that the barrel crossed the hitting region just in front of home plate, traveling upward on the same line that the average pitch is moving down....Then, if their bat position is correct but their timing is slightly off in their effort to hit the ball over second base, they still connect with the ball squarely...(p.98)

With a lower maximum frequency and the addition of a strong component of lower-frequency sound from the natural bat oscillation, the "crack" becomes more of a "thunk."...A onetime center fielder advised me that "when the ball is hit straight at you...if you hear the bat "crack," run back; if the sound is a "thunk," run in." (p.128)

Generally, the player who drills out his bat stuffs the hole with cork or rubber. But this added material serves more as a detriment than an advantage...that energy will not be effectively transferred to the ball...the extra material will then only slow the bat down a little and slightly reduce the distance a ball can be hit. Such a filler will take another 3 feet off a 400-foot drive. (p.137-8)

The Hidden Classical Background of Pooh

From The Pooh Perplex:

I shall say nothing of Wart's theory that Pooh is an Orphic deity with seasonal-sacrificial-redemptive crop-growing characteristics–a clever idea, but one that is given a disproportionate weight in Wart's sense of the total meaning of the book. (p.7)

Pooh's nightmare of endless Heffalumps making straight for his honey supply and eating it all requires, I believe, no complicated analysis (and least of all a Freudian one!). It is the very image of proletarian revolution, of the workers arising in a concerted mass to seize the means of production from the jaded bourgeoisie. (p.25)

Piglet has doubted whether Pooh's Ode to him, which at first sight looks as pure and false as Pindar upon whose locker-room eulogies it is patently modeled, really has told the truth...False, you see, but not naïve, and not false in Pindar's sense of toadying to the fixed system of glory, either. (p.33)

 Milne's chief spokesman, Eeyore, is a veritable Thersites, a malcontent who would have put Marston to shame. (p.43)

For those unfamiliar with Frederick Crew's work in The Pooh Perplex and Postmodern Pooh, the assembled critical essays are in jest.

Doyle's Miles Gloriosus

From The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard:

He was a good boy, this Duroc, with his head full of the nonsense that they teach at St. Cyr, knowing more about Alexander and Pompey than how to mix a horse's fodder or care for a horse's feet.

...it would have interested me to see something of the customs of the English, which differ very much from those of other nations. Much as I should have wished, however, to have seen them eat their raw meat and sell their wives,...

Truth and the Critical Spirit

From Etienne Gilson's Héloïse and Abélard:

We have seen the birth of the "Critical Spirit" and all the pedantic fiction with which it encumbers history, fiction which at its best is not even entertaining. For it is characteristic of the "Critical Spirit" to be itself the measure of historical reality. When an event surprises it, the event loses its right to have taken place. When a sentiment goes beyond its grasp, he who expresses that sentiment loses the right to have experienced it. It is to be feared that this story of great souls, reduced to the stature of the scholars who write about it, is sometimes wanting in graphic beauty, but it will inevitably be wanting in truth when that truth consists in personal greatness.

There is nothing quite comparable to the passion of the historians of the Renaissance for its individualism, its independence of mind, its rebellion against the principle of authority, unless perchance it is the docility with which those same historians copy one another in dogmatizing about the Middle Ages of which they know so little.

The best example we can find of historical cliché is the concept of an anti-Christian Renaissance which historians of literature pass on from one to the other as though Lefèvre d'Etaples, Budé, Erasmus, ever pretended to be escaping from any dogma, or as if their adherence to dogmas ever prevented St. Bernard from being eloquent, Dante and Petrarch from writing well, or St. Bonaventure and St. Thomas from thinking.

In conclusion:

What, then, do the facts teach? That Abélard was the first of the moderns? This would be to substitute one piece of foolishness for another. That Héloïse was the first modern woman? On the contrary, as Jean de Meung would say, the world has never since seen her like: Mais je ne crei mie, par m'ame, / Qu'onques puis fust nul tel fame. (By my soul, I do not believe / That another like her ever lived)

I also found this fact interesting:

Either the abbess [i.e. Héloïse] has a good memory, which is most likely, or there was a copy of [Ovid's] The Art of Loving at the Paraclete.

Abaelard and Heloise surprised by Master Fulbert

Jean Vignaud, 1819

A Code of Honor

From Steinbeck A Russian Journal:

Among Moscow correspondents, particularly in the winter, a code of honor has grown up, rather like the code which developed in the West concerning horses, and it is nearly a matter for lynching to steal a man's book. But Capa never learned and never reformed. Right to the end of his Russian stay he stole books. He also steals women and cigarettes, but this can be more easily forgiven.

Sophists and Freshmen Composition

From the most recent issue of Classical World ("The Progymnasmata in Imperial Greek Education"):

But Quintilian complains of Latin rhetors, the equivalent of Greek sophists, who wrongly forced the teaching of more difficult progymnasmata onto the grammarians. Those rhetors were like modern English professors who do not want to teach freshman composition. (p.79)

Old but Good News for Budding Classicists

From The University: An Owner's Manual (1990):

Departments of the classics can usually handle more students very easily. To indicate an intention to major in a subject that is searching for increased undergraduate enrollments may in a particular year boost one's chances for admission, although it is difficult to find out which departments are facing a shortage.

A university college has never consisted of five hundred Mr. Chipses surrounded by a few thousand adoring and adorable undergraduates.

All of us who have reached advanced years can recall teachers whom we vigorously detested in high school or college, only to discover in more mature years the excellence of their instruction. As evidence, I can cite my own and nearly everyone else's high school Latin teacher.

From the same on a more sobering note:

Dim employment prospects and low salaries are bound to affect quality of students now and quality of faculty later. Some will choose the academic life no matter what–individuals who are fatally attracted by the virtues and show little concern for the vices. But in the more ordinary cases, young people make rational and cautious career choices. All of us want to lead decent, well-remunerated lives, and when obvious and interesting alternatives exist, they will be selected without hesitation. 

I include a few other quotes about the profession:

There are three professions which are entitled to wear the gown: the judge, the priest, and the scholar. This garment stands for its bearer's maturity of mind, his independence of judgement, and his direct responsibility to his conscience and his god. [quoted from E.K. Kantorowicz]

Personally, I would be thrilled to see a return to the scholar's gown on more occasions than a swelteringly hot day in May. Here is the rather obvious:

An assistant professor does not assist anyone; an associate professor is not anybody's associate. These are merely designations for independent scholars who receive low pay and little secretarial help, while performing the same tasks as full professors.

Elsewhere:

The chances of having courses taught well–with verve and imagination–are greatly diminished when content and structure are imposed by "outsiders" without debate and discussion. Anyone who has attended schools run by our armed forces will have little difficulty in appreciating this point. 

Plus ça change plus c'est la même chose: Guinness and Thucydides

From Alec Guinness' autobiography Blessings in Disguise:

(16 yrs. old) The next thing for me to brush up some poetry in case the Cassons invited me to recite. I knew some Ella Wheeler Wilcox, which I found hysterically funny; also some Keats, Tennyson, Chesterton and a few yards of Shakespeare.

The last time I saw Sybil [Thorndike] to talk to was at a small private lunch party at the Garrick Club. She was an old lady by then, suffering acutely from arthritis but remarkably gallant and cheerful. I asked her if she still managed to learn a few lines of verse each day, which had been her life-long custom. 'Yes,' she said, 'but only a very few. I've given up the Greeks. But the real sadness is my silly old hands, which don't allow me to play Bach any more...' 

I would be quite happy to see a return of black for mourning, and to hear no more electric guitars in church. Perhaps we could return to resounding hymns... 

As I set off to join the Navy he [Guinness' father-in-law] handed me a pocket edition of Thucydides, saying, 'This will help you keep things in perspective.' Inside the book he had scribbled, 'Plus ça change plus c'est la même chose.' It was a more acceptable gift than the vast unplucked turkey which he dumped, on Christmas Eve, in the kitchen of our tiny cottage. Seizing the duck we were going to have he said, 'That's just what I want; an extra duck,' and made off with it. The turkey wouldn't go in our oven anyway and Merula burst into tears. Not only had I found a wife; I had acquired a family.